Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith,

Donald Judd Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism (a term he nonetheless stridently disavowed).Tate Modern websit"Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Donald Judd" Retrieved on February 19, 2009. In ...

, John McCracken,

Agnes Martin Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004), was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence". Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Mar ...

, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell,

Anne Truitt Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921December 23, 2004), born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after influential solo shows at André ...

, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to

abstract expressionism Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

and a bridge to

postminimal Postminimalism is an art term coined (as post-minimalism) by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971Chilvers, Ian and Glaves-Smith, John, ''A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art'', second edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p ...

art practices.

History

Minimalism in visual art, generally referred to as "minimal art", ''literalist art'', and ''ABC Art'' emerged in New York in the early 1960s. Initially minimal art appeared in New York in the 60s as new and older artists moved toward geometric abstraction; exploring via painting in the cases of Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman and others; and sculpture in the works of various artists including David Smith,

Anthony Caro Sir Anthony Alfred Caro (8 March 192423 October 2013) was an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using ' found' industrial objects. His style was of the modernist school, having worked with Henry Moor ...

, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt,

Carl Andre Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear and grid format sculptures and for the suspected murder of contemporary and wife, Ana Mendieta. His sculptures range from large public artw ...

, Dan Flavin,

and others. Judd's sculpture was showcased in 1964 at the Green Gallery in Manhattan as were Flavin's first fluorescent light works, while other leading Manhattan galleries like the

Leo Castelli Gallery Leo Castelli (born Leo Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an Italian-American art dealer who originated the contemporary art gallery system. His gallery showcased contemporary art for five decades. Among the movements which ...

and the Pace Gallery also began to showcase artists focused on geometric abstraction. In addition there were two seminal and influential museum exhibitions: '' Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture'' shown from April 27 to June 12, 1966 at the

Jewish Museum A Jewish museum is a museum which focuses upon Jews and may refer seek to explore and share the Jewish experience in a given area. List of Jewish museums Notable Jewish museums include: *Albania ** Solomon Museum, Berat *Australia ** Jewish Mus ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * ...

, organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine and ''Systemic Painting'', at the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

curated by

Lawrence Alloway Lawrence Reginald Alloway (17 September 1926 – 2 January 1990) was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an i ...

also in 1966 that showcased geometric abstraction in the American art world via shaped canvas, color field, and hard-edge painting. In the wake of those exhibitions and a few others the

art movement An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defin ...

called ''minimal art'' emerged. The European roots of minimalism are found in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich,

Piet Mondrian Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (), after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian (, also , ; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being o ...

and other artists associated with the

De Stijl ''De Stijl'' (; ), Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term ''De Stijl'' is used to refer to a body o ...

movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor

Constantin Brâncuși Constantin Brâncuși (; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of modernism, ...

. Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of

Barnett Newman Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of ...

, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp,

Giorgio Morandi Giorgio Morandi (July 20, 1890 – June 18, 1964) was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still life. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting simple subjects, which were limited mainly to vases, bottles, bo ...

, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of

that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s.

Paintings

In contrast to the previous decade's more subjective abstract expressionists, some minimalists explicitly stated that their art was not about self-expression, theirs was 'objective'. In general, minimalism's features included geometric, often

cubic Cubic may refer to: Science and mathematics * Cube (algebra), "cubic" measurement * Cube, a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex ** Cubic crystal system, a crystal system w ...

forms purged of much

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials. One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter Frank Stella, whose early "pinstripe" paintings were included in the 1959 show, '' 16 Americans'', organized by

Dorothy Miller Dorothy Canning Miller (February 6, 1904 – July 11, 2003) was an American art curator and one of the most influential people in American modern art for more than half of the 20th century. The first professionally trained curator at the Museum o ...

at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of th ...

in New York. The width of the stripes in Stellas's pinstripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used for stretchers, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog,

noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward the less gestural, often somber, color field paintings of

and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MoMA show, artists including Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis, had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic, and hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.

Monochrome revival

Monochrome painting had been initiated at the first Incoherent arts' exhibition in 1882 in Paris, with a black painting by poet

Paul Bilhaud Paul Bilhaud (31 December 1854 – 8 January 1933) was a French playwright and librettist. An old friend of the author Alphonse Allais, he is remembered along his friend as a forerunner of minimalism with his painting ''Combat de nègres pendant ...

entitled ''Combat de Nègres dans un tunnel'' (''Negroes fight in a tunnel''). In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer

Alphonse Allais Alphonse Allais (20 October 1854 – 28 October 1905) was a French writer, journalist and humorist. Life Allais was born in Honfleur, Calvados. He died in Paris. Work He is the author of many collections of whimsical writings. A poet as much as ...

proposed seven other monochrome paintings, such as ''Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige'' (''First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow'', white), or ''Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge'' (''Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea'', red). However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century

Dada Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 192 ...

, or

Neo-Dada Neo-Dada was a movement with audio, visual and literary manifestations that had similarities in method or intent with earlier Dada artwork. It sought to close the gap between art and daily life, and was a combination of playfulness, iconoclasm, ...

, and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich. Yves Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the

artist's book Artists' books (or book arts or book objects) are work of art, works of art that utilize the form of the book. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects. Overview Artists' books hav ...

'' Yves: Peintures'' in November 1954. Ad Reinhardt, whose reductive nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, wrote of the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature." Reinhardt's remark directly contradicts Hans Hofmann's regard for nature as the source of his own abstract expressionist paintings. A famous exchange in 1942 between Hofmann and Jackson Pollock was recorded by Lee Krasner in an interview with Dorothy Strickler (on 1964-11-02) for the Smithsonian Institution

Archives of American Art The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washing ...

.Lee Krasner, Archives of American Art
/ref> In Krasner's words:

Specific objects

The tendency in minimal art to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic, and fictive in favor of the literal led to a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns.

had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in ''Arts Yearbook 8'', 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and

Lee Bontecou Lee Bontecou (January 15, 1931 – November 8, 2022) was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bont ...

. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of

George Earl Ortman George Earl Ortman (October 17, 1926 – December 16, 2015) was an American painter, printmaker, constructionist and sculptor. His work has been referred to as Neo-Dada, pop art, minimalism and hard-edge painting. His constructions, built with a ...

, who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These specific objects inhabited a space not comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoid easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

Criticism

This movement was heavily criticised by modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some critics thought minimal art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic

Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formali ...

, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a formalist critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In "Art and Objecthood", published in ''Artforum'' in June 1967, he declared that the minimal work of art, particularly minimal sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act

observation Observation is the active acquisition of information from a primary source. In living beings, observation employs the senses. In science, observation can also involve the perception and recording of data via the use of scientific instruments. Th ...

and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimal art. Fried's essay was immediately challenged by postminimalist and earth artist

Robert Smithson Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and mu ...

in a letter to the editor in the October issue of ''Artforum''. Smithson stated: "what Fried fears most is the

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

of what he is doing — namely being himself theatrical". Another critique of minimal art concerns a fact that many artists were only designers of the projects while the actual art works were executed by unknown craftsmen.

References

External links

Article on Minimalist Art at the Dia Beacon Museum
"Dia Beacon", Tiziano Thomas Dossena, Bridge Apulia USA N.9, 2003

Tate Glossary: Minimalism

MoMA, Art terms ''Minimalism''
{{Geometric abstraction Contemporary art Modern art Abstract art Western art